Saturday, April 30, 2016

Economy of South Korea

South Korea is a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the G-20 major economies. South Korea has a market economy that ranks 11th in the world by nominal GDP and 13th by purchasing power parity (PPP). It is a developed country, with a developed market and a high-income economy. South Korea is the only developed country included in the group of Next Eleven
countries. South Korea had one of the world's fastest growing economies
from the early 1960s to the late 1990s, and remains one of the fastest
growing developed countries in the 2000s. South Koreans refer to this growth as the Miracle on the Han River of Heavy-Chemical Industry Drive, and the top four chaebol generate 90% of South Korean conglomerate profits. By creating favorable policy directive for economic development as preceded by Japanese economic recovery as the logistic supplying bastion for American troops in the Korean peninsula during and after the Korean War, South Korea's rigorous education system
and the establishment of a highly motivated and educated populace is
largely responsible for spurring the country's high technology boom and
rapid economic development.
Having almost no natural resources and always suffering from
overpopulation in its small territory, which deterred continued
population growth and the formation of a large internal consumer market,
South Korea adapted an export-oriented economic strategy to fuel its
economy, and in 2014, South Korea was the seventh largest exporter and seventh largest importer in the world. Bank of Korea and Korea Development Institute periodically release major economic indicators and economic trends of the economy of South Korea. In the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the South Korean economy suffered a liquidity crisis and relied on the bailout by the IMF that restructured and modernized the South Korean economy with successive DJnomics policy by President Kim Dae Jung, including the resultant of the national development of the ICT industry.
The growth of ICT industry has been far concentrated on the hardware
sector, which focuses on expanding wired and wireless telecommunication
network penetration rather than the software sector, which creates
innovative applications and value-added services. The economy of South Korea is the global leader of Consumer electronics, Mobile Broadband and Smartphone. The economy of South Korea ranks No.1 in the world in 2015 Bloomberg Innovation Index. Despite the South Korean economy's high growth potential and apparent
structural stability, South Korea suffers perpetual damage to its
credit rating in the stock market due to the belligerence of North Korea in times of deep military crises, which has an adverse effect on the financial markets of the South Korean economy. However, renowned financial organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund,
also compliment the resilience of the South Korean economy against
various economic crises, citing low state debt, and high fiscal reserves
that can quickly be mobilized to address any expected financial
emergencies.
Other financial organizations like the World Bank describe Korea as one
of the fastest-growing major economies of the next generation along
with BRIC and Indonesia. South Korea was one of the few developed countries that was able to avoid a recession during the global financial crisis, and its economic growth rate will reach 6.1% in 2010,
a sharp recovery from economic growth rates of 2.3% in 2008 and 0.2% in
2009 when the global financial crisis hit. The South Korean economy
again recovered with the record-surplus of US$70.7 billion mark of the
current account in the end of 2013, up 47 percent growth from 2012, amid
uncertainties of the global economic turmoil, with major economic
output being the technology products exports. South Korea was a historical recipient of official development
assistance (ODA) from OECD. Throughout the 1980s until the mid-1990s,
South Korea's economic prosperity as measured in GDP by PPP per capita
was still only a fraction of industrialized nations. In 1980, the South Korean GDP per capita was $2,300, about one-third of
nearby developed Asian economies such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and
Japan. Since then, South Korea has advanced into a developed economy to
eventually attain a GDP per capita of $30,000 in 2010, almost thirteen
times the figure thirty years ago. The whole country's GDP increased
from $88 billion to $1,460 billion in the same time frame. In 2009, South Korea officially became the first major recipient of ODA to have ascended to the status of a major donor of ODA. Between 2008 and 2009, South Korea donated economic aid of $1.7 billion to countries other than North Korea. South Korea's separate annual economic aid to North Korea has historically been more than twice its ODA.On June 23, 2012, South Korea is landmarked to become the 7th member
of the 20-50 club (with the population surpassing 50 million and
maintaining per capita income of US$20,000), chronologically, after Japan, United States of America, France, Italy, Germany and United Kingdom.A free trade agreement between the United States of America and the Republic of Korea was concluded on April 1, 2007. The European Union–South Korea Free Tra de Agreement
was signed on 15 October 2009. The South Korean economy is heavily
dependent on the energy imports and the related refinery technologies in association with the Ministry of Knowledge Economy and in accordance with the South Korea-Australia Free Trade Agreement. The Canada–South Korea Free Trade Agreement was concluded in 2014. China–South Korea Free Trade Agreement went official on November 10, 2014. South Korea has the largest indoor Amusement park in the world, Lotte World, adding to the notable export-oriented music industry guided by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Republic of Korea (for more, see Korea K-Pop Hot 100).

Were There Vegans In The Ancient World?

04/30/2016

:::: news ::::

New research published in the Journal of Archaeological Science and reported in Live Science
has shed light on the ancient Egyptian diet. By analysing the carbon
atoms in mummies that had lived in Egypt between 3500 BC and 600 AD, the
French research team were able to determine that ancient Egyptians were
largely vegetarian. ... read more ÄTät@@http://veganenthusiasts.com/were-there-vegans-in-the-ancient-world/

"It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction,
endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your
death: why not blame the person who’d stuck you with a life? OK, maybe
it was unfair. But your mother could always blame her own mother, who
herself could blame the mother, and so on back to the Garden. People had
been blaming the mother forever ..."— An Excerpt from Jonathan Franzen’s Novel Purity.

"One of the reasons why humanity has still not
recognized the level of the ancients’ knowledge lies in the incorrect
reading of the hieroglyphics or pictographs.

The most important aspects of the knowledge passed
down by the priests from generation to generation was recorded in the
language of symbols rather than words. A pictograph can convey several
levels of information (meanings). Individual symbols contained the sense
of a whole doctrine, while to express a single idea in words sometimes
requires volumes of books. Moreover verbal records leave room for
incorrect interpretations and manipulations.

The ability to read sacred texts written in the
hieroglyphic manner was lost long before the demise of Egyptian
civilization. The priests of the last dynasties were no longer the
bearers of knowledge, aware of its true meaning. When painting
hieroglyphics on the walls of temples, they had about as much
understanding of them as an ordinary clergyman today does of a book on
quantum physics. That is why the teachings of the ancients on, say, the
“energy of life” which reached Aristotle through Thales of Miletus and
came down to the present day were interpreted incorrectly.

What actually was the distortion of the theory of
the “water of life” that Thales brought from Egypt? We shall quote
exactly parallel pronouncements. Aristotle taught that:

Water is the chief principle of all things. Everything proceeds from it… constantly arising and to water everything returns. The changes in things are dictated by compression and solidification…

The
incorrect interpretation of this knowledge that came down from deep
antiquity was the result of a failure to understand the meaning of the
relevant hieroglyphics. In particular the symbol, which had the meaning of the concept “energy” is still today
translated by classical Egyptologists as “water”! Apply your logic and
take a look at the symbol. It strongly resembles a sinusoid. In
mathematics such curves are used to describe a wave or oscillatory
process. Such an analogy arises naturally from the observation of the
movement of waves on the surface of water.

Everything that comprises the nature of material is a
consequence of various vibrations in the environment. Therefore the
symbol that resembles a wave was used as naturally reflecting the
essence of this process.

If we replace the word water in the statement above
with “energy”, we get close to what lay at the very foundation of the
doctrinal world view of the Ancient Egyptian priests.

Energy
is the chief principle of all things. Everything proceeds from it …
constantly arising, and to energy everything returns. The changes in things are dictated by compression and hardening [of energy].

After
reading these words we realize that the initiates of deep antiquity
from whom the ancient Egyptian priests inherited their concepts were
scientists with a very high level of knowledge and that Albert Einstein
was not the first to discover the capacities of space, time and energy
fields when he concluded that:

«Field is the only reality, there is no physical matter, only a condensing and compacting field».

Fig.7 Detail of a mural in the tomb of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings

The meaning of the symbol
becomes even more obvious when scanning one of the walls in
Toth-Ankh-Amon (Tutankhamen’s) burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings
we light on the depiction of the priestess Ur–t Khekau, whose name
translates as “the possessor of sacred force” (Fig. 7). Above her palms
is the familiar hieroglyph, indicating that the hands of the priestess
recorded here are radiating the energy that not only ancient, but
contemporary psychics and spiritual healers use to influence the energy
structure of others.

In the light of this, the “Myth of the Creation of
the World” assumes its true meaning, revealing to us the secret of what
the ancient pre-dynastic priests knew about the beginnings of all that
exists:

«In the Beginning of Beginnings there was nothing:

no air, no light, no sound, no sky, no earth, no fire, no life, no death — only one endless,immobile Ocean of Primordial Energy immersed in gloom (Nun).

God created himself out of the primordial energy. His name was Atum (Everything and Nothing)…»

(translated from the Ancient Egyptian)

(translated from the Ancient Egyptian)

Fig. 8 THE CREATION. The sarcophagus of Seti I. The twelfth division of
the Duat.6 From the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings

The
god NU rises from the primordial waters(energy) and holds aloft the
ship of Ra containing the “Great Nine Gods” headed by Ra, who created
himself from Nun (
the Ocean of Primordial Energies). The gods sailing in the ship of Ra
symbolizes the process of discovery (self-discovery). Movement in the
cosmos implies that events take place in space and time, i.e. the
Universe accessible to the senses begins to exist as a mass of moving
entities. The wavy lines forming a background to the depictions of the
ship of Ra, Osiris, Nu and Nut indicate that all the action described is
taking place in the realm of energy.The god Ra (Kheper) is depicted in
the guise of a scarab beetle. The word kheper, translated as
“development” literally means “rotation”, while the word paut means “the
primordial material or substance” from which everything is made.Thus,
described here in a brilliantly simple manner is the mechanism by which
through wielding energy (changing its speed of rotation (and spin),
intensifying and differentiating it). God condenses material, creating
“the gods” and all sorts of life forms. That is why the scarab rolling a
ball of dung (reflection of God rotating bundles of energy) was the
symbol of the great creative process of Kheper. The observant
philosopher of Antiquity who wanted to record the idea for posterity
chose a visual image that was seen every day and readily understood by
the inhabitants of the desert. This image was also powerful because,
seeing the scarab each day, people turned in their thoughts from mundane
concerns to the Eternal. The image of the scarab Kheper was something
like the catalyst for instant meditation on the nature of God the
Creator. With time the idea was distorted and taken to absurdity. That
is why present-day conventional Egyptology has this to say about Kheper:

“The
sacred beetle was a symbol of self-creation, as the Egyptians believed
that the beetle emerged spontaneously from the ball of dung (which in
reality serves as a protection for the eggs and larvae that emerge from
them). Thus they venerated the anthracite-black dung beetle under the
name Khepri, that is “he who comes from beneath the earth” and long
since associated it with the Creator-God Atum and viewed it as an image
of the Sun god. Just as the beetle pushes a ball of dung before it, they
believed that Khepri rolled the sun disk across the sky. The solar
beetle that gave light and warmth, reproduced in soapstone or pottery
became one of the favourite amulets and was placed with the dead as a
symbol of re-emergent life.”.

The idea that came down
through time of the environment being an ocean of energy was an
all-embracing and widespread one that found reflection not only in
fundamental religious doctrines about the nature of the world, but also
in prehistoric pottery that played the role of a kind of visual
theoretical textbook (Fig. 9)

Fig. 9. The design on a prehistoric vase.

This composition found on an Ancient Egyptian
vase is interesting as it contains several layers of useful information
hidden from the eyes of the uninitiated.The four pyramids in the centre are direct evidence
of the existence of pyramid complexes in prehistoric times. The
pyramids, animals, birds and human beings are placed on wavy lines,
symbolizing the idea that the Earth and water are sources of energy.The wavy lines running upwards are geological faults
through which, as if through channels, the Earth’s energy flows make
their way to the surface. The composition as a whole explains that the
“bowels” of the Earth are a source of energy for birds, animals, humans
and pyramids. The sets of four short zigzags above the humans and
pyramids are energy flows running from the Earth and the tips of the
pyramids upwards to the sky that is represented by several rows of wavy
lines showing that it too is an energy-charged space.The integrity of this knowledge and the broad
distribution in deep Antiquity of a common language of symbols is shown
by symbols found on the walls of dolmens across an area extending from
the Black Sea coast to the mountains of the Western Caucasus (Fig. 10).

Fig. 10. A dolmen on the River Zhene

The texts that accompany this symbol spoke of the practices (processes) that linked the human being to “the source of life energy”7,
while the structures upon which the symbol was placed acted as
amplifiers of this energy. These resonating structures were used to:

convey the energy flow (information) over a distance,

to restore an organism’s bio-energy rhythms by
synchronizing them with the flows of energy emerging from the depths of
the Earth. That is why on some dolmens we come across vertical versions
of the pictogram symbolizing the upward flow of energy.

In speaking of energy, the vitally active element
of creation from which all the rich variety of life forms proceeds, we
at the beginning of the new millennium are capable of grasping what lies
behind these words. For centuries this ancient knowledge remained as
inaccessible for humanity, thrown back into the night of ignorance, as
it was in Aristotle’s time.

More than 5,000 years before Thales visited
Egypt, its priests possessed precise knowledge in the natural sciences –
and it is only the vanity and blinkered attitudes of representatives of
science, still unwilling to acknowledge such “predecessors”, that
prevents the study and perception of the evidence left in stone by
Ancient Egyptian culture as the expression of scientific knowledge and
methods, above all in the realm of medicine and parapsychology. That
knowledge and those methods are of a comparable level at least to ours
today, and in a number of instances go far beyond what our civilization
has yet accomplished.

Thus the title of the text from the Book of the Earth mentioned earlier (Fig.3) could at the least be corrected to become: «He Who Conceals (Time), A Personification of the Energy Clock».

What we have seen above is far from the only example
demonstrating a fairly deep scientific approach to the understanding
and description of the world. It is one more weighty reason to consider
the ancient texts more attentively, with an understanding that they may
contain priceless information for us.